The panel consisted of the director of the film, two of the film’s subjects , two senior staff members of Linden Lab, and myself as a psychotherapist who works with both online relationships and substance use behaviors. Noted online journalist Wagner James Au moderated.

Behind us, on a wall-sized screen, we could see the and read the comments of residents of Second Life who had gathered to participate in the conversation. In fact, one of the film’s subjects attended in the form of her Second Life avatar.

There was a fascinating split in audience orientation: those attending in-person (at least those who spoke up) seemed by and large oriented to the popularly-understood addiction model, and applied it readily to online experience. Those participating from Second Life, the chat log shows, largely rejected the idea of being “addicted” to online life.

I presented the notion that it’s not helpful to say that any activity simply Is Addictive or Isn’t Addictive, because that’s too simplistic; it implies that any given behavior (online activity; consumption of alcohol; shopping; exercise) is All Good or All Bad. We know from real life that anything, including online gaming, can provide both benefits and possible consequences, and it’s important to take both into account when deciding whether you have a situation you want to change.

In talking about virtual worlds particularly, I described Second Life as a “playground of personality,” where you get to find out what it would be like to live life in some radically different way than you do offline. What would it be like to have a different appearance? A different sex? A different age? A different species? The one we all enjoy, right at the start of 2L: What would it be like to fly? This means of shaping your own identity in 2L can offer enormously gratifying personal and interpersonal benefits which have to be measured against the possible harm that sometimes occurs, so that you can make an informed and empowering decision about whether and how you want to change your online life.

Sunday, May 2
Film: 1:00 pm
Panel: 3:00 pm
Sundance Kabuki Cinema
1881 Post Street
San Francisco, CA 94115

Tickets to the panel are free, but require a reservation. Stop by and join the conversation!

Life 2.0 at the San Francisco International Film Festival

Valkenburg and Peter believe that the 21st century Internet encourages honest talking about very personal issues – feelings, worries, vulnerabilities – that are difficult for many self-conscious teens to talk about. When they communicate through the Internet, they have fewer sounds and sights and social cues to distract them, so they become less concerned with how others perceive them. This in turn reduces inhibition, leading to unusually intimate talk.

The psychologists have also shown that “hyperpersonal” Internet talk leads to higher quality friendships, and that these quality friendships buffer teenagers against stress and lead to greater happiness. However, solitary “surfing” of the Internet has no positive effects on connectedness or well-being, and hanging around public chat rooms – though much rarer – still appears psychologically risky.

Seventy-one percent (71%) disagree and believe the amount of time they spend this way is appropriate.

Seventy-five percent (75%), however, believe young children spend too much time on computers and other electronic equipment.

[...]

Adults ages 18 to 29 are much more closely divided on the question of personal use than those in any other age group: 44% say they spend too much time online and using mobile devices, while 51% say they do not. But 80%-plus of those 50 and older don’t think they spend too much time like this.

Non-married adults worry more than those who are married that they’re spending too much time this way.

“I didn’t think I had a Problem at all…. until I hit some sort of wall and realized that I do have a Problem.”
“I am ready to say that yes, I am an Internet Addict.”
“I thought my Internet use was Harmless, but now I see that it is Harmful.”
“I admit that I am powerless over my Internet addiction.”

The problem with these principles is that they’re all-or-nothing. You either are an Addict or you’re not — completely. The Internet is either a completely positive presence in your life, or a thoroughly harmful one. And if you decide, given the evidence of harm, that the Internet is a Bad Thing in your life, does this imply that total abstinence is the one and only answer?

I would say no.

A much more realistic way to assess this (or, really, any) element of your life is to recognize that it’s a mixed bag, with both positive and negative elements. Here’s an example of how one person might evaluate the pluses and minuses:

“Spending a lot of time online is a lot of fun, feeds my curiosity, puts me in touch with distant friends, and sometimes calms my nerves or gives me a comforting escape. On the other hand, it can result in losing sleep when I stay up surfing or chatting at all hours, I find myself neglecting important offline tasks that need doing, and I’m preoccupying myself online lately to keep from feeling some sad things I’m going through in my life right now.”

Your own experiences and values might match the above example, or not. What’s important here is that you judge your time online not by an arbitrary number of hours, or by some theoretical principle of how much is “too much,” but by the actual effects on your life, both positive and negative.

There’s much more to say here, and I do this sort of work with clients around these types of concerns, but let me leave you with this question: if you determine that the negative effects of excessive online time are serious enough that you want to make a change, are there practical ways for you to reduce the harm while keeping the benefit?

The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates. Twitter helps you share and discover what’s happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. “What are you doing?” isn’t the right question anymore—starting today, we’ve shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, “What’s happening?”

If you’re a tweeter, have you used Twitter solely to express your personal status throughout the day, or is Twitter for you more of a give-and-take about what’s on your mind and on the minds of those who reply and retweet? It’s a very different social experience depending on which approach you take.

But what really ails me? Cyberchondria, loosely defined as the baseless fueling of fears and anxiety about common health symptoms due to Internet research, or, as I like to think of it, Googling oneself into a state of absolute, clinical hysteria over every last pain, itch and strange freckle on your body.

It’s easy to lose our bearings on a phenomenon like this and blame the Internet itself as the new social hazard that gives rise to this condition. It’s even in the language used here: cyberchondria as a diagnosis, and web searches as the cause. But actually (and the article does acknowledge, if not fully explore, this point), what we’re seeing here is an anxiety problem that isn’t created online — it just expresses itself there. People have had excessive worry and imagined catastrophic outcomes from mild symptoms for centuries — they just got their medical information elsewhere, until very recently.

If a person is having excessive anxiety about nightmarish health scenarios whenever a cough or itch starts, then it’s the obsessive thoughts and the compulsions to act on them that we should be examining and working to relieve. The Internet is just the arena in which those obsessions or compulsions play out. Google and WebMD do make it a lot easier and faster to act upon an impulse than, say, traveling to a medical school library — but it’s a mistake to conclude that a person is developing health-related anxieties because so much unfiltered medical information is now available online.

The good news is that with skilled counseling, these types of problems are treatable. And so I say again: “Don’t blame the Internet!”

It’s not any of those things.

At earlier times in human history, when travel to neighboring communities was expensive or dangerous and travel to distant lands all but impossible for the average citizen, letter-writing reigned as the essential medium for carrying on a relationship with a trusted friend, family member, business associate or romantic partner in a far-off place. Written correspondence became so central to everyday life that a rich literary genre rose up around it: the epistolary novel, structured entirely around the exchange of letters. Letter-writing has served as a central part of family and business life until very, very recently (historically speaking), when the invention of the telegraph and then of the telephone gave us other options.

(Monica Whitty writes about the tradition of romantic correspondence and how it might parallel online relationships in her fascinating article, “Love letters: The development of romantic relationships throughout the ages,” compiled in The Oxford Handbook of Internet Psychology.)

When correspondence was the only tool we had for talking to those who couldn’t be there with us, we cherished the letter and nurtured our skill in expressing ourselves with the written word. Now we have a technology that welcomes us back into the epistolary tradition, giving us a new means of overcoming a geographical barrier to form an intimate bond. Is a relationship conducted via email or chat different in some basic ways than a face-to-face relationship? Sure — and helping folks understand how the medium might be influencing the message is part of my work as a therapist specializing in online issues. But when the validity of your online relationship is challenged, take heart. Hundreds of years of human history say you’re in good company.

A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.
~Emily Dickinson

* The advent of Skype, as broadband connectivity becomes increasingly affordable, offers an online communication medium that includes visual and sound cues, but I’ll focus on text-based correspondence for the purposes of this post.

The film examines the lives of a series of hard-core gamers, mostly in World of Warcraft and a bit of Everquest. It takes a wide and largely non-judgemental view of the culture, and of the effects — both positive and negative — of serious immersion into MMORPGs. A must-see if it screens near you.

Identity Renegotiation on the Virtual Playground by Thomas Blume

• People use virtual worlds such as SL as a means of exploring appearances, relationships, and even genders that they might never know in real life.

Second Life as a Tool in REBT by Jeffrey Warren (REBT is a particular set of therapy techniques.)

• People can use SL to experiment with social behaviors that frighten or overwhelm them in real life, in a simplified environment. It can be a testing ground for change.

Suicide in SL by Jason McGlothlin

• People in a lot of pain sometimes use SL to explore the experience and the emotional consequences of acts that they might be thinking about, but wouldn’t necessarily carry out in real life.

In the Shadows of the Net: Understanding, Assessing, and Treating Problematics Sexual Behavior Online by David Delmonica

• Virtual worlds and online communities often reduce or remove people’s sexual inhibitions, creating a space that feels safer to explore sexuality in ways that real life doesn’t offer.

All of these folks are talking about how in a virtual world, you get to play with ways of being and doing that are different from how you live in Real Life. People have different opinions about what this looks like — and about which are healthy and which are unhealthy.

I’d like to broaden this notion to describe our online identities in lots of different contexts. In virtual worlds and online games, in discussion groups and blogs, on dating sites and on social networking pages — we always make a choice about who we want to be in each of these venues, expressed by what we do and don’t talk about, our choice of language, how an avatar looks and behaves, how we describe ourselves on a dating profile, even our screen names. It depends on the medium, the experience you want to have, and how you want to be seen. For example, in this blog I’m engaging my readers with the part of me that’s a therapist interested in online interactions, as opposed to all the other parts of my life and identity that aren’t represented here.

Some people fashion their online identities as closely as they can to what they feel is their authentic, real life self. Others construct identities that are very different from how they perceive themselves in real life. Some describe this as “the ability to be someone you’re not.” I disagree; I think when you’re constructing an online identity that intentionally differs from your real life self, you’re actually exploring parts of yourself that were always there, but that don’t get a chance to come out in real life.

What identity choices do you make, in which areas of your online life, and why?

Update: Sherry Turkle began writing about the forming of online identities nearly fifteen years ago, in her book:

Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet

Many of the environments she describes (remember text MUDs? Usenet? ELIZA?) look different today, but her discussions about Who We Are online are just as insightful and relevant as in 1995.

Clinical monitoring of heavy web users revealed their brain activity and blood pressure increased markedly when they were cut off. The stress of being disconnected was equivalent to that of running half an hour late for a key meeting, being about to sit an important exam or, in the worst cases, being sacked.

It would be easy to dismiss this type of anxiety as faddish or imaginary, but many of us know that it’s quite real. When email is an integral mode of communication in our lives, losing email access means managing for a time without a primary connection to the rest of the world. The good news is, it doesn’t have to feel like that. Like many forms of anxiety, the stress around being disconnected electronically can be reduced significantly with some very simple and practical strategies. Here are a few:

1. Ask yourself: What’s the worst that could result from my not having email access right now? Be specific with your answer, e.g. “My boyfriend will think that I’m ignoring him and might break up with me.” or “The client will become annoyed that I’m not responding to her question quickly enough. Maybe the whole meeting will be canceled.”
2. Now ask: What are the odds that this worst-possible outcome is actually going to take place while you’re out of email contact? Most people find that when they take an honest look, these disaster scenarios are actually pretty remote possibilities: 5% chance? 10%? Instead, what’s the more likely outcome? “My boyfriend will wonder where I am, maybe be a little annoyed or worried, then get on with his day until I’m in touch.” Or: “The client will probably move on to other projects for the moment, since our deadline is still days away.”
3. Finally, determine a good plan for dealing with the situation if some form of what you’re fearing actually happens: “If he’s mad at me, I’ll explain that my email went down and that I couldn’t respond.”  Or: “If email is still down in an hour, I’ll call the client on the phone and suggest an alternative means of having this conversation, like a conference call.” Remember that your Plan B is not ideal, maybe not as convenient as if you had email access, but could be good enough.
4. Go do something else enjoyable and diverting—something that doesn’t require connectivity.

Want to take a pre-emptive step and practice? Consider setting aside an upcoming weekend as Email-Free. Make whatever arrangements you need beforehand to minimize the practical impact of being AFK (Away From Keyboard) for two days, and prove to yourself that you can manage it.